Just upgraded my desktop and the old system (E8500/4GB) will be used as WHS. Was thinking of going with v2 but I'm getting very low throughput from the system with Vail. I tired both WHS versions (out of box configs) on the system -- Vail was giving me 5-10 seconds peaks at 90-100% followed by long periods (minutes) in the weeds (<10%), whereas v1 gives more frequent 90-100% peaks with trough in the 20-30% -- a kind of "saw tooth" trace.

This is with Gbit lan and 7K jumbo frames, the only difference is Vail was using AHCI and v1 was in IDE-mode, everything else is identical.

Comments? I know Vista/WS2008 added a bunch of new TCP/IP options but I've only just started to switch over to W7 from XP based OS so don't really know much about them, anyone know if tuning will help improve Vista based OS' throughput?

All NICs support jumbo frames? And the switch/router? I believe jumbo frames can be pretty finicky since most devices don't support the same size/method. I'd try without jumbo frames and see how it does.

I get around 40% utilization on my Server 2008 R2 Enterprise to Windows 7 desktop over a gigabit LAN (no jumbo frames). 2x Intel Gigabit CT NICs in the server, configured for load balancing, and a single onboard Marvell LAN in my desktop. That's to my desktop's RAID5, so about 50MB/s. If I transfer from server to my SSD, it runs at ~110MB/s and thus 100% utilization. Basically reading from server, writing to desktop.

So I think it really depends upon your drive speeds. To saturate a gigabit LAN, you need at least 100MB/s (read and write depending on which way you're transferring) from your hard drives.

WHS is known to be bottlenecked by the HDDs. With WHS v1 I get a peak of about 60-70mb/s then it usually drops off to about 20 - 10mb/s after the first 15 - 20 seconds. On rare occasions it drops more. This is still better than most cheap NAS devices. Only a box with RAID will do better.

Edit:

Looks like it was hardware. When I tried to installed Vail a second time the system wouldn't boot with SATA in AHCI mode, had to disable DriveXpert to get it going. Now I'm getting decent throughput, Vail looks to be slightly better than v1 especially with W7 clients.

=================================

Thanks very much for the replies.

Everything supports jumbo frames, if I use standard frames I can't get above 500mbps. Maybe I didn't make it clear, I tried *BOTH* WHS v1 and Vail on the *SAME* system (E8500/4GB/VelociRaptor/ASUS P5Q), and Vail gave me much slower throughput.

I don't have a similar capture when the E8500 was running Vail, but in the same time frame as the attached trace I'd see maybe 4 90-100% peaks lasting less than 2 grids and the rest of the time it'll just hover around 10% -- was like being on a 100mbps rather than Gbit LAN.

All the drivers are the latest and greatest, I've check NETSTAT for obvious problems, so unless it's beta code or MSFT have deliberately throttled throughput in Vail because WHS is a "Home" product, I must have done something wrong. Does WS2008/Vail default LAN settings need tweaking to get Gbit throughput? I have a bit of experience with setting up NT/2K/XP networks but Vail is my first try with Vista base server.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jdrom17

2x Intel Gigabit CT NICs in the server, configured for load balancing, and a single onboard Marvell LAN in my desktop.

Teaming will be my next stop once I have the WHS up and running, I'll probably need help on that too